My how quickly things change during hot stove season. The last time I did a once over of the latest Zack Greinke rumors, the conventional wisdom was that the Rangers were the heavy favorites to land his services, so much so that the bottom less money pit in Los Angeles Dodgers were thinking of bowing out of the sweepstakes altogether and focus on Anibal Sanchez or something. Instead, it was announced tonight that Greinke has agreed to sign a six year, $147 million contract with the Dodgers. The top line number here is a bit lower than what had been floating about, but the $24.5 million AAV is the highest in baseball history for a pitcher on a multi-year contract, surpassing the previous record of $24.4 million owned by C.C. Sabathia.
More importantly, however, Greinke's decision should get the dominoes falling in place around the rest of the league pretty quickly. Texas, for one, figures to reverse course from trying to sign Greinke/trade for Justin Upton to re-signing Josh Hamilton and trading for an additional pitcher, perhaps James Shields or R.A. Dickey. If you're looking for how the Yankees fit into all of this, well, it means that you can pretty much forget any thoughts, no matter how feint, of them signing Hamilton this winter. But if nothing else, the next week or two should be more exciting than the last one. There were a lot of talks and rumors and ground work laid at the Winter Meetings, but few concrete moves, at least with notable players involved. You got the feeling that everyone's decision making was being held up by which big game hunting team Greinke was going to decide to suit up for, and now that that's out of the way I would expect to see some of that groundwork turn into actual, concrete, developments.